Top Senators: White House Emails Covered Up, Not Destroyed

[demobabe]

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

Headlines proclaim millions of White House/RNC emails have been "lost." But does that mean they have been destroyed forever or are they simply missing? According to the two top Senate Judiciary members, the emails have not mysteriously disappeared but are actively being hidden by the Bush Administration.

"You can't erase e-mails, not today," Judiciary Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy declared on the Senate floor Thursday. "They've gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."

"There's good reason to believe that they can be found if we look hard enough," said Ranking Member Arlen Specter.

These guys know what they are talking about, unlike Sen. Ted "series of tubes" Stevens. Just because Karl Rove hits the "delete" button on an email does not mean that all record of the message has been erased. All reasonably sized organizations typically monitor and record any incoming and outgoing activity behind the scenes.

Full article here: http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/analysis/204

[liberal N proud]

1. They can't be completely destroyed anyway

There has to be a server that these were initially stored on that has a backup tape sitting somewhere that it can be recovered from.
They may have deleted them from the server they were created on, but there are always servers where corporate and I am sure government emails are stored and those servers do get backed up. Standard IT practice.

[Mister Ed]

2. Their air of certainty makes me think they may already have copies of some of the emails. n/t

[Robbien]

17. The committee which investigated Abramoff has 750,000 records

During the course of its two-year investigation, the committee issued more than seventy subpoenas and other requests for documents and received over 750,000 pages of records.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/15/114515/619

Bet there is at least one or two Rove emails in that bunch.

[Rex]

3. Of course emails can be destroyed, it is possible to erase all info

that can never be recovered. Ever. Takes awhile, but YES can be done! Depends on how many harddrives the actual emails are stored in. It can be done, just might be a magnitude too high if all over the WWW.

My guess is they are spread all over the place and can be found who knows where. Well Rove knows, he just hit delete a zillion times.

[demobabe]

4. If you're an IT professional

And it's your job to make sure all of the data in White House computers is not destroyed by terrorist attack, fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, nuclear bomb, or simple user error by an unwitting intern (or deliberate destruction by a top official) - you're going to make sure you have off-site backups of ALL data that could be a problem if it's lost.

That's your job. Data loss means you get fired.

Email from personal accounts will be a little harder, but those emails can ususally be subpeonaed as well (most services include a message ID which can be referenced).

My guess is the Democrats already have what they need.

[Rex]

6. Man I hope so!

You can't trust the BFEE or let your guard down for a second with them.

[demobabe]

7. Indeed!

I really believe someone has something on this... waiting to see how this all plays out. Even if email was somehow succesfully erased, we're talking many emails among many people and many computers. If they keep digging, they'll find something - with as much as these guys have done, it shouldn't take more than ten seconds.

;)

[Rex]

9. True.

;)

[Atman]

12. Don't forget, e-mails may pass through several servers...and end up on...

...a DESTINATION computer. KKKarl may have deleted the e-mails from his desktop PC (and zeroed out his own drive), but not from the various servers, nor from the destinations. If the dems can locate, for instance, ONE related e-mail to Jack Abramhoff from Karl, they'll then have the evidence to subpoena Jack's, too. Or whomever's. That's when the whole thing seriously unravels for them.

.

[dysfunctional press]

15. what if the emails are between two people on the same rnc server?

and further- what if the hard drive is periodically replaced in that server?

[UNCLE_Rico]

14. I AM an IT professional...

Certainly, in the case of the actual government, official WH servers, yes, certainly a qualified IT professional using a reliable archival process such as you describe should have to be in place, and I assume things would be as you say.

However, I can tell you 4 certain that if you administer the rnc or gwb43 mail servers (for example), and your job is to make sure that centralized backups DON'T get made and CANNOT ever be recovered, it is equally possible to do so.

Millions and millions of emails will easily fit on ONE hard drive, mi amigo. It takes me less than one second to remove any one of my hard drives, as it is what they call 'hot swappable' and slides right out the front. Certainly the RNC could have similar hardware as I do. And, surely, there are all sorts of devices out there in the world that could quickly make a hard drive go bye-bye forever once it was removed.

Seeing as how we already know that *'s cronies were all well aware of the "security issues" involved (i.e. accountability) in using the actual WH based accounts, it seems safe to assume that the 'juiciest' emails are NOT going to be found on anyone's .gov accounts. WE NEED the emails from the non-WH, RNC, et al, servers, and the simple fact of the matter is, if they were administered from day one by professionals with a 'leave no traces behind' mandate from on-high ... we could be easily be screwed.

The only hope, if this is the case, would be to track them down on the destination servers ... which would only exist if these professionals were really lame. The only sensible way to run a system like this, if the goal was internal security, would be to make sure that your mail server only allowed correspondence WITHIN the domain that it administers, and that the ONLY way mail could be sent or read was via a web client.

Imagine, if you will, you have an account called [e-mail]. Say the .gwb (outbound AND incoming) mail server is in the torture chamber below *'s ranch in Crawford. This server is set up so that when you send email out, you are restricted to sending it to OTHERS with a .gwb email account. Trivial to implement. When you send or view your email, you use a web browser (like you do when you have a yahoo or hotmail account), the browser is your mail client. A professional would make that the only way you could send or view your email. Sort of like if you have a yahoo account, and you send email to another yahoo account. See how that works? It never LEAVES the control of YAHOO, except in the form of an html page generated by the web server, which absolutely doesn't HAVE to create a log of what it's sent out, very simple to turn logging on/off. Thusly, the administrators can be assured that no other mail server has a copy of anything, nor could a local copy get retained/downloaded on any sender or recipients actual hard drive. This is all very trivial to implement, provided all the conspirators are on the same domain.

In a closed system such as this, these emails NEVER EXISTED ANYWHERE but on THAT ONE hard drive (assuming the web server that serves up the html page for the web client resides on that same hard drive, which is also simple to implement). At $50 bucks for a 200GB hard-drive, these guys could pull them out EVERY DAY and destroy them if they had the slightest inclination to do so.

In such a system, unless someone physically cut/pasted the text into a .doc or something like that ... the emails NEVER LEAVE THE RANCH.

The fact is, I'm afraid, that a completely untraceable system could EASILY EASILY EASILY have been implemented and utilized by these assholes. It all depends on how smart they were in PLANNING the need for covering their tracks (when it comes to the non-WH servers). It's as simple as that.

Leahy, et al, I hope you get on the ball on this fact, cause time's a WASTIN' ...

>>>edited for punctuation<<<
>>>edited for clarity<<<

[Atman]

16. You're absolutely right, of course, but...

What's "wrong" with your theory isn't the tech angle -- it's the psychology of the criminals involved. If every communication is instantly trashed forever, by design, the thugs might miss out on valuable blackmail opportunities! Or evidence. Just sayin, you're certainly correct about the tech aspect, I'm just wondering whether they'd really want absolutely no record of some of these communications.

.

[pscooper]

5. Didn't Rove get his degree from ITT Tech?

That whole U of U thing? It's all a smoke screen. He went to ITT Tech and learned how to delete emails.

Check it out. I have a solid source on that.

[Vincardog]

8. KKKarl never graduated he had to get right to shit slinging dirty politics.

[Imagevision]

10. Specter; "that they can be found if we look hard enough," - so what are you waiting for? - the

white house's permission?!!

[in_cog_ni_to]

11. NO KIDDING! That's why I'm thinking

they're just letting these crooks dig their hole DEEPER. Why else would those server not be confiscated by now? There HAS to be a better reason than simple incompetence by our Dems. Leahy's NOT a stupid man.

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

13. Damn, I hate when it's Specter leading the charge. Disappointment is sure to follow. n/t

MKJ